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The vaccine, the work of a team from the University of Helsinki, aims to give bees the necessary resistance to fight serious and potentially deadly microbial diseases in pollinators.
"If we can save even if there is only one small part of the bees with this invention, I think we would do a good deed by helping to save the world a little bit," said Dalial Freitak , researcher who leads the project.
In recent years, the mysterious have decimated bees. Colony collapse (CCD), which is attributed to mites, pesticides, viruses and fungi, or a mixture of these factors.
According to the UN, more than 40% of invertebrate pollinators, especially bees and butterflies are endangered and their sharp reduction could, according to scientists, lead to higher food prices and, therefore, a
It was once thought that it was impossible to vaccinate insects because they do not have antibodies, one of the main mechanisms used by humans and other animals to control diseases. But in 2014, Freitak, a specialist in insects and immunology, realized that butterflies fed certain bacteria transmitted their immunity to their offspring.
Freitak and Heli Salmela, who worked with bees and proteins, created a vaccine against Loque American. , the most widespread and devastating bacterial disease in bees, also known as the American puttrine disease.
In this new procedure, the queen bee is treated with a piece of sugar and then transmits immunity to her offspring. "
The team declares that" there are a number of regulatory hurdles "for the vaccine to be available on the market and that waiting four to five years for it to reach the market is an optimistic estimate," Freitak says. A number of causes
Scientists believe that diseases are just one of the many causes of pollinator loss, other intensive agriculture, reducing diversity insect and pesticide feed.
But the Freitak team think that protecting bees against diseases will make them stronger and therefore more resistant to other threats. As an example of a recent effort, the European Union and Canada voted in favor of banning neonicotinoids, which were found to be very harmful to bee breeding.
According to a United Nations study published in 2016, the equivalent of US $ 507,000 per year in food crops is directly dependent on pollinators, and the volume of these foods has increased by 300 per cent. over the last 50 years.
As the number of pollinators decreased, some farmers resorted to manual pollination or bee hiring. the case of fruit trees in parts of China.
In Helsinki, the project is funded by external funding, but the team investigates them at the University of Graz in Austria, the famous zoologist Karl von Frisch. His discoveries on the dance of bees as a means of communication and their application to human language earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973.
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